Talking Race

Not long
ago, while working in a school near San Diego, Calif., Vargas was talking with another teacher when the
conversation randomly led to the topic of dental health.

“She
said to me, ‘Have you noticed that the Latino kids’ teeth are all rotten? It’s
cultural because Latino parents give their kids lots of candy and they don’t
brush their teeth.’”

Vargas
told her colleague that a lack of health insurance would be a more likely
explanation. The other teacher brushed her off with “not all kids, but most of
them.”

Although Vargas was concerned that her
colleague’s beliefs would trickle over to her treatment of Latino students, she
never expressed her concerns to the administration.

“I don’t think I was comfortable with
talking to the principal — because what if the principal thought just like
her?” she said.

In many
classrooms across America, race and ethnicity are very much on the table.
Teachers dream of seeing their students discuss difference in a constructive
way. Someeducators actively encouragetheir classes to get outside their comfort zones
and confront the country’s racial history.

But in many faculty rooms, there’s little
to no talk about race. Whether the topic is a racial disparity in students’
academic achievement, a teacher who feels victim to racial discrimination or
even simply a question about a black student’s hair, teachers often elect to
keep their mouths shut. If teachers can’t have the race talk with each other,
how can schools effectively educate their students about difference?

“It’s important for teachers to discuss
race with each other for a number of reasons,” said Christine Sleeter, a
professor emerita of education at California State University, Monterey Bay and
editor of the book Facing Accountability in Education: Democracy and Equity at Risk.
Sleeter said teachers and principals need to open the door to dialogue “so
schools are able to confront issues of race that have to do with student
learning, such as how tracking systems work, who ends up in which tracks and
why…And teachers [need to recognize] their own beliefs about the learning
abilities of kids and how they overlap with race.”

That teacher sitting next to you in the
break room — the one who is too worried to say what she really thinks — may
hold the key to higher student achievement. Teachers often fret about their
struggles to reach their students and their difficulties in getting parents
involved. An honest and collegial dialogue about race, Sleeter says, can help
teachers self-analyze their comfort with parents and students and its
connection with teachers’ own attitudes about race.

Confronting Race

These days, Nuri
Vargas doesn’t have nearly as much trouble talking about race and ethnicity
with her colleagues. As a first-grade teacher at EJE Elementary in El Cajon,
Calif. — where students learn in a dual-language environment — Vargas feels
more open. In the dual-language setting, Latino heritage is always out in the
open as a topic for discussion. And Vargas isn’t the only person on the faculty
who understands that heritage.

“I’m really comfortable
because the majority of us are Hispanic and our principal is Hispanic,” said
Vargas. She says she’s no longer dogged by the feeling that anything she says
about race or ethnicity will be interpreted in a negative light.

Speaking out can be a lot harder when
you’re one of only a handful of teachers of color in your school.

“There is still a pretty high penalty for
even going near the topic of race,” said Carmen Van Kerckhove, co-founder and
president of New Demographic, a diversity education firm. “There’s always the
possibility that you’ll be perceived as playing the ‘race card.’”

In an age of budget cuts and teacher
layoffs, teachers often worry that speaking out will lead to a pink slip at the
end of the year — or will get them moved into less-desirable position within
the district.

“The teacher who’s causing trouble, the
principal can displace them,” said Hilton Kelly, a professor of education at
Davidson College in North Carolina and a former high school teacher. Kelly
studies the experiences of black teachers with a focus on those who work in
overwhelmingly white schools. Kelly has spoken with teachers of color in the
South who feel they’re suffering the consequences for speaking up about race.

“These teachers are being punished, and a
lot of times people are living with it,” he said.

Another barrier to racial dialogue, Van
Kerckhove said, is the idea that America is a “post-racial” society. The term
“post-racial” seems to have gained prominence during the 2008 presidential campaign, as a way of
describing the broad appeal of then-candidate Barack Obama. After Obama’s
election, the term morphed into the notion that America has completely gotten
beyond racism.

“A lot of people feel like racism is now
over, especially with President Obama in office, and that anyone who brings up
race is doing it as a shady tactic to get ahead career-wise,” Van Kerckhove
said. “So it doesn’t surprise me that even in educational settings, teachers of
color are having a hard time broaching the subject.”

The Pink Poodle

For some teachers, putting race into context is a
challenge because they don’t understand the situation, or can’t explain it.
White people often lack experience in talking about race, largely because they
don’t feel marginalized because of race. They fear saying something ignorant or
offensive.

“Whites usually
don’t have the tools to be able to talk about it very knowledgeably,” explained
Sleeter. “We grow up learning that it’s impolite to talk about race.”

White people
often don’t even know where to begin the conversation, Sleeter says. “[The
reaction is,] ‘What am I supposed to be talking about? What should I even be
saying, that’s not going to be totally impolite?’”

Even for
teachers of color, labeling an incident or comment as racist is sometimes hard
to do.

Hilton Kelly
recalls encountering this resistance during his research, when he interviewed
black K-12 teachers at predominately white schools.

Timothy, 30, is
the only black teacher at his high school. When Kelly asked Timothy if he
experienced racism at work, he said “yes.” But Timothy found it difficult to
even utter the word “racism.”

Timothy:
…I
have had a couple of incidents with the administration that I have felt [pause]
like racism — the pink poodle syndrome.

Kelly: What is the
“pink poodle syndrome?”

Timothy: The pink
poodle — you are standing among a crowd of people and you are almost a mascot
or a wild one. This is what I get from faculty a lot. It is more annoying than
oppressive. “Hey,” somebody might say, “I saw the 60 Minutes report on the war
in Africa, what do you think about that?” … I must say that I struggle to say racism
only because I don’t want to cheapen the word... I would not want to attach my
experiences with a term that I use to describe systemic degradation and
deprivation… .

— From “Racial Tokenism in the School
Workplace: An Exploratory Study of Black Teachers in Overwhelmingly White
Schools.”

Race 101

The dialogue about race should start in
the classroom — the teacher-prep classroom, that is. Preservice teachers should
be exploring multiculturalism and discussing ways to honor diversity in their future classrooms.

But in many
cases, Kelly said, the coursework isn’t giving preservice teachers the tools to
speak about race. Even when future teachers take courses on diversity and
multiculturalism, Kelly said, those courses don’t take the critical approach to
race that future teachers truly need.

“Food, folklore
and festivals are not the sameas an analysis of race in
America,” Kelly argued.

Nor do preservice teachers have the words to
explain the racial, ethnic and
culturally-based experiences of others.

Tambra Jackson,
a professor at the University of South Carolina’s College of Education, used to
be one of those silent teachers.

In the beginning
of her teacher preparation, Jackson felt silenced in class because, in many
cases, she was the only person of color in a predominantly white
institution. Race was just not part of the curriculum, she says.

“I was not very
vocal in bringing up issues of race in teacher prep,” recalled Jackson. “No one
ever discouraged me if I wanted to focus my projects and papers around black
culture or other ethnicities, but no one ever encouraged it. And no one ever
made that the focus in their teaching.”

Then Jackson
experienced a pivotal moment during a summer internship in Cincinnati with the
Children’s Defense Fund Freedom School. She gained in-depth knowledge on
inequality and education through teaching a social-justice-oriented curriculum.

“That program
really helped me to find my voice as an advocate. When I came back that year to
do student teaching my professors said, ‘What happened to you?’”

Jackson continued to stay vocal during her
professional career. Even as the sole teacher of color at Washington Center
Elementary in suburban Fort Wayne, Indiana, she brought race to her colleagues’
attention.

“Because I was
the only teacher of color, it got to a point where, I think, my colleagues
expected everything that came out of my mouth was going to be about race,
diversity, or social justice,” Jackson said.

‘It Starts at the Top’

Jackson also felt comfortable talking
freely because she had support from administrators. She came to Washington
Center Elementary with a sense of mandate: the area superintendent had
encouraged her to apply there. A desegregation order had allowed for children
of color to be bussed into the suburban school. While the student body was
growing more diverse, Jackson was the only teacher of color.

Jackson was
appointed to be the Diversity Index teacher at her school, which meant that she
regularly convened a group of students to have explicit conversations about
diversity in the school. Working with students on these issues inevitably
entailed discussing race with their teachers.

“I knew that I had administrative support
outside of the school,” Jackson said about the area superintendent of the
school district. “I knew, should I have any issues, I had someone I could go
to… I think the administrator knew that also.”

Administrator support or willingness to
encourage racial discourse can have a huge impact in the work environment for
teachers.

“This is one of those things that
definitely starts at the top,” said Carmen Van Kerckhove of New Demographic.
“When the leadership is on board and really understands the issues, it makes it
a lot easier to trickle down.”

Van Kerckhove advises administrators not to
rush head-on into complicated discussions of racial inequality because some may
not be ready to handle it. Take into account your staff’s and school’s comfort
level with race, she says, and go from there.

Jackson suggests principals break the ice
by telling groups, especially diverse groups, from the start that the
discussion will be hard, but that having these talks is a commitment the school
needs to make. Then principals need to follow up with action.

“Frame the discussion in terms of starting
with basics people can get their heads around,” recommends Christine Sleeter.
She uses the example of an elementary school administrator, who told Sleeter
how she used data to get teachers talking about race and ethnicity.

“It took her a lot of work just to get the
teachers to begin to say we have a racial achievement gap in this school,”
Sleeter says. The administrator opened up conversation by simply giving
teachers test scores and asking them to look at it. “She asked the teachers,
‘What do you see is the pattern there?’ When teachers were starting to say, ‘I
see the white students are achieving better than the Latino students,’ for them
that was a step forward.”

Feature Articles in Number 36: Fall 2009

"There’s nothing wrong with the way your grandparents talk,” my elementary school teachers used to say. “Standard
English is different. Not better or worse. It’s just a way of talking that you need to know.”

Monica Edwards was frustrated. As a teacher
in an urban elementary school, Edwards faced a class that was largely African
American and Latino: she was neither. She often felt that she wasn’t effectively
reaching them, and she was beginning to get discouraged.

Kawania Wooten’s voice tightens when she describes the struggle she’s having at the school her son attends. When his class created a timeline of civilization, Wooten saw the Greeks, the Romans and the Incas. But nothing was said about Africa, even though the class has several African American students.

Since 2002, Teaching Tolerance’s Mix It Up at Lunch Day program has helped millions of students cross social boundaries and create more inclusive school communities. So why are we changing a model that has worked?